- The first walnut tree is dead.
- Waving knobby arms, all elbows
- chopped off at the wrists
- with no curtain to hide its silver limbs.
- The second is senile.
- Long limbs reach out angularly
- and fly a few green leaves like flags.
- Three birches crowded on the corner
- snake their red roots into the flower beds
- against the house.
- The long roots of the liquidamber
- arch out of the yellow lawn.
- The small spruce beside the porch
- takes half the walk
- and scrapes against the garage door
- as it swings open and closed.
- The twisted juniper’s rusted combs
- are full of dust and spider’s webs.
- One green limb arches out of proportion
- from under the cedar.
- The cedar is too big for the small back yard.
- The guava tree bends out from under it
- over the fence into the neighbor’s yard,
- showing silver underside of leaves.
- The pyracantha has a fine green powder
- on every limb, spare of leaf.
- The Japanese plum is broken
- and dying from the inside,
- a crab shell filled with crumbly sponge
- crawling with termites.
- The hawthorn stump in the flower bed
- is rooted like an absessed molar,
- and little hawthorns peek between green iris swords.
- Walnuts grow from nuts the squirrels buried.
